Reaching stamping quality goals with MIE Trak Pro ERP software

By MIE Solutions UK Ltd
schedule16th Jul 19

Quality starts with informed decisions

 

An ERP software system can provide dashboards, reports, accurate data, and standards and procedures.

To meet customers’ demands, delivering quality products without defects is critical. Therefore, for any manufacturing company, quality control is critical too.

To achieve this, stamping manufacturers must monitor many areas in their manufacturing process by quality capture and reporting.

The Role of MIE Trak Pro ERP Software in Quality Control

An effective quality control system has several components. The following describes the top three:

  1. Dashboards and Reports. What if you could view a dashboard on your computer that graphically and quickly reveals all the quality issues and trends in your company? What if those dashboards could be accessed and understood by everyone in your company?
  2. Accurate Data. Achieving a reliable and actionable reporting system with dashboards and reports requires one thing: accurate data. Without it, your colorful graphs may be pretty but useless. Data is king. But how do you continuously and consistently capture reliable data?
  3. Standards. Standards and procedures that are easy to follow, with minimal extra data input, are critical. If your management and employees do not fully buy into the quality process, you will be spinning your wheels to capture accurate data.

Dashboards, reports, accurate data, and standards and procedures are what a robust enterprise resource planning (ERP) software system can provide. Therefore, a full ERP software system is a critical part of any comprehensive quality control strategy. It integrates both process control and management reporting in your shop.

Capturing data regarding quality in these four areas in your shop will increase the efficiency, reputation, and profitability of your company.

1. Customer-side Quality

At its most basic level, a true ERP system allows you to create orders, ship products, and bill each customer for your products.

When a customer has a problem with one of your products, you want to be able to handle the return process as smoothly and efficiently as possible. This is where a return merchandise authorization (RMA) comes in.

Many organizations require that their suppliers meet international standards.

Every quality system should permit you to create an RMA. It should allow a customer to thoroughly outline all details regarding the return of a product. These include part number, specifications missed, inspector notes, failure types, root cause analysis, and corrective actions. The ERP system should also provide containment actions, work flow, and disposition processing—all of which should be smoothly integrated.

A robust ERP system can aggregate the data from the quality control records to display dashboards and scorecards. These one-stop views of your data can display significant trends by:

  • Part
  • Customer
  • Failure areas
  • Responsible departments

2. Quality From Suppliers

When your company receives a defective product from a supplier, you should be able to record the defect information and report it to the source. As your company inspects incoming products and you find defects, you would create a nonconformance material reporting (NCMR).

The NCMR is the vehicle that allows you to notify the supplier, who can then send you a replacement part, credit, or repair. NCMRs contain the same data points as RMAs with the addition of the supplier-specific information.

Any good ERP system that provides a QC module should include this process.

Again, a robust ERP system can aggregate the data from NCMRs to create a “report card” that you can send to your suppliers. The report card outlines each supplier’s quality issues or its excellent performance. The report cards can encourage your suppliers to deliver quality parts.

MIE Trak pro ERP software system’s dashboard offers an at-a-glance overview of all systems.

3. In-house Process Quality

In some cases, you want to be able to report a quality request that is not job-related. Examples of this include process improvements such as a request for updated documentation, safety

problems related to a part, and audit information. This is the role of corrective and preventive action request (CPAR). You can also use a CPAR to log information for root cause analysis and corrective actions. This is another important tool provided by a quality control system.

4. In-house Product Quality

Often a product or material must be scrapped during the manufacturing process. When this occurs, an efficient company captures the relevant information. In this case, an employee would create a record of the event directly on the shop floor where the failure occurred. This is another purpose for the NCMR.

A good ERP system can handle product inspections and be able to create an NCMR.

Also, a dashboard can display all NCMRs in real time. The dashboard then becomes a trusted tool that monitors both machine and employee quality, producing data on which you can base meaningful actions.

Dashboards that contain inaccurate data will not provide the information to make business process improvements. ERP software that contains an integrated quality control system and accurate data creates the potential for actionable dashboards.

Integrating Quality Standards With MIE Trak Pro ERP Software

To help you meet customer requirements, your quality control system must be capable of handling ISO 9001 and AS9100 standards (see Quality Standards and Manufacturing Primer sidebar).

Also, when reviewing ERP software, make sure it includes a comprehensive and integrated quality system that produces dashboards and reports, making your business more efficient.

With the features described here, quality control becomes an integral aspect of managing a manufacturing business from start to finish. The ERP software system becomes highly useful to ensure that your product’s quality is monitored and improved.